


sing for the angel a psalm of shadows

by Raven (singlecrow)



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Crowley Has A Vulva (Good Omens), Islamic References, M/M, Nonbinary Character, please consider this in the excruciating detail I have, the Arrangement required Aziraphale to tempt people, to TEMPT PEOPLE
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-24
Updated: 2019-07-24
Packaged: 2020-07-18 01:29:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19966501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/pseuds/Raven
Summary: “Sahib,” Aziraphale says. “I am not named for Israfel. I am the one to whom Allah gave the name.”Five times Aziraphale attempted to tempt a human being and failed, utterly and completely, in service of God’s plan.





	sing for the angel a psalm of shadows

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to soupytwist.

_Eilean Ì, 678 AD_

“No, Aziraphale, no, no!” Crowley says, loudly enough for the Irish monk Adomnàn to roll over in his sleep and mutter, even though he’s not supposed to be able to hear either of them. “You can’t just rock up and say, well, my dear fellow, have you ever considered re-enacting the Fall of Man, and leave it at that. Temptation is an _art_.”

“Well, it’s not my forté,” Aziraphale says, flustered, gathering himself against the wall of the tiny cell. Outside the barred window the sea laps on the sand trim of the greensward. “It’s not supposed to be my anything.”

“If this Arrangement is going to work, you’re going to have to try harder,” Crowley says, shaking their head with annoyance so their hair starts coming down. “Or do you want to be back in jolly old stinks-to-high-wherever Londinium bringing blessings to the scions of Marcus Aurelius?”

“I don’t know why _you_ want to,” Aziraphale says grumpily. He’s still pressed against the wall, looking down at Adomnàn, now peaceful again in this island fastness. The place is called Eilean Ì, or Eilean Idhe, or Ioua, or a half-dozen other meaningless things. Caluimn Cille, who brought the monks here, will be a saint one day. His cousin Adomnàn is heading that way himself, but apparently that’s not part of Hell’s plan. 

“I’m really a city demon at heart,” Crowley says primly. “You’ll come round to it, angel. Now, where were we? _Temptation_.”

Aziraphale is alarmed. Crowley shakes their head again, dislodging more of their hair, and sighs. “You see, the problem with these monkish types—“

“Monastic types, Crowley.”

“Yes, thank you, Aziraphale. The problem is, I’m not always sure what they prefer.” Crowley sits down on the floor – other than the pallet bed and the writing desk, there is no furniture in the room – and makes a frustrated noise. “Argh. Will you fix the hair?”

It’s now completely unrolled itself from the neat knot it was in, rippling down as it did in Mesopotamia but with the red gleam subdued in the failing light. When humans invent such things as latitude and longitude, Eilean Ì will be at fifty-six degrees north, so far around the curve of the Earth that the monks retire earlier than the sun. Aziraphale smiles, sits down beside Crowley and starts braiding. He puts two plaits in each side, and by the time he’s finished Crowley has relaxed. Their body is soft and pliant against his. Aziraphale, too, has relaxed. The new Arrangement worries him. But this is something familiar about their human bodies; this is something they know how to do.

“Is that better?” Aziraphale asks, after a minute.

“Much,” Crowley murmurs. They put a hand on each side of their head, pleased. Then they lick their finger and use it to trace the line of Aziraphale’s throat. It’s a long, slow course of a movement, where the heart’s blood is just under the skin. 

Aziraphale submits to it for a few moments, dazed, then sits up with a jerk. “Crowley!”

“What you never know,” Crowley says, their finger moving along to Aziraphale’s collarbones, “is whether they like girls or boys, or both, or not. Not that you’re not quite lovely, angel.”

Aziraphale shivers, at the touch and at the oncoming night’s chill. “Crowley, you snake, you’re not supposed to tempt _me_. That’s not what this is about.”

“You’re right,” Crowley says, the purr rippling through their voice. “I’m not tempting you, Aziraphale. You and me, though, we’re going to do this together.”

“Do what?” Aziraphale says anxiously, but he looks up at Adomnàn asleep on his pallet and he knows. “Crowley, we could tempt him to drink. Or perhaps usury! The Almighty looks down on that these days.”

“I’ve got a job, and this is it,” Crowley says. “Do you want to go back to the rats and the rookeries?”

Aziraphale is silent. He’s liked Eilean Ì; the wash of saltwater, the soft turf, the library. He’s liked the bells, the day-to-day devotions of the monks. He’s liked Crowley here with him.

“Right then,” Crowley says, softly. “Adomnàn! Adomnàn, wake up. It’s so cold in here, isn’t it? You’re shivering in your sleep, look at you. Never mind, you’re about to have the most lovely dream.”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says. He’s decisive, not flustered. “I won’t do anything against his will.”

“It’s never against their will,” Crowley says, still softly. “He’ll only see us if he wants to. And only if we give him something to see. And” – a snakish grin – “options as to what he’d like to see.”

The angel-plaited hair, the flowing cape, the slightly different timbre of Crowley’s voice, all come together into a harmonious whole. Crowley isn’t a woman, just as a hood, cowl and flowing robe don’t make an angel into _Brother_ Aziraphale. In this domain of austerity, they both gleam luminous; they’re both temptation. Crowley kisses Aziraphale, a little off-centre, for their audience. 

Aziraphale shivers again, a whole-body shudder. Something is happening inside his head that he can’t quite comprehend. “You want us,” he says, “to… put on a show.”

Even the phrasing makes him cringe. He hugs his knees in embarrassment and looks up at Crowley through his lashes. 

“You’re going to have to get better at this,” Crowley says again. They push Aziraphale up against the wall, with more melodrama than real force. Aziraphale surrenders to it anyway, his head tipped against the damp stones. Crowley kisses him in a way that feels practised, suggestive of four thousand years of tempting humans. It feels good, and strange, and violating. 

“Crowley, I’m an angel of the Lord, I can’t,” Aziraphale says, belied by breathlessness. “I can’t, I can’t do this.”

“Not against your will,” Crowley says.

Aziraphale thinks: _nor against yours_. They’re still both on the floor, in the shadows. If this were something real, something true, they would be luminous unto themselves; they would cast their own light.

He shakes Crowley off, regretfully. Adomnàn turns over in his sleep, muttering about cabbages. Crowley’s hair is coming down again.

*

_Delhi, 1830 AD_

Aziraphale is still an angel of the Lord a millennium later. The poet Ghalib doesn’t know that yet, but he will.

“Israfel,” he says. “Sing it again.”

Truthfully, Aziraphale doesn’t have much musical talent. Being a part of the heavenly host, he’s a soldier, uniform: he doesn’t have much of a talent for anything. Crowley provided the demonic transformation required for him to tempt Mirza Ghalib, in a honeysuckle-crumbling courtyard, with chameli flowers gushing from the cracks, to lie on the long low bistar and listen to a beautiful voice from the dark. 

“I’ve had enough,” Aziraphale says, surprised anew by how he sounds to his own ears, coquettish and sweet. Crowley was quite proud of him for that. Aziraphale has learned how to tempt humans, now. Gluttony is easiest, followed by sloth, pride, rage, and surprisingly, usury. 

But he’s still… uncertain, about this. Lust. About his own capacity for it; about its rightness; about if it really doesn’t matter which one of them does it, as Crowley says. 

About Crowley.

“Well, Brihannala,” Ghalib says, which is a theological sex joke. Angels have doubts instead of gender, and neither-nor is Ghalib’s own preference. In that regard Aziraphale has fallen where he originally landed, somewhere halfway between Crowley’s easy femininity and the form Aziraphale has been using in these latter centuries. “What shall we do, then?

“Recite to me,” Aziraphale says. There’s a different, more obvious answer, given the need for temptation, but he’s in the mood for self-indulgence. Ghalib is the one with the real God-given gift, and Aziraphale is tired of temptation and blessing, of heaven and hell and their eternal pointless war.

That thought startles him. He puts it away as Ghalib begins to recite without self-consciousness, his voice sumptuous with metre. It’s heady, drowsy-making. It rings through Aziraphale’s head even in Ghalib’s pauses, between couplets, for breath. 

“Through the bonfire my grief lit that darkness,” Aziraphale murmurs in one of the gaps, in sleepy repetition of the ghazal. “The shadow went past me like a wisp of smoke.” 

Ghalib’s pleased. “You like it?”

“Of course,” Aziraphale says, honestly. He sits up again, hugging his knees. It makes him think of Adomnàn centuries before, leaning against the wall while Crowley used Aziraphale to Hell’s own purposes. The thought should make him feel angry or unclean, but doesn’t. Adomnàn became a saint, in the end. Crowley never did anything to him, or Aziraphale, that either of them didn’t want. 

“Then why the sad eyes, O Israfel of the heavenly music?” Ghalib asks. If Crowley were here, they’d huff and say something scathing about poets. The thought makes Aziraphale smile.

“Nothing,” he says. “Come beside me, sahib.”

Ghalib shifts closer, obligingly. “Ah, I, too, can be serious,” he intones. “I would be a saint, if I drank less wine!”

That’s one of his published couplets. Aziraphale sits up.

“What is it, Israfel?” Ghalib asks, breaking off in the middle of the next couplet, which is a lovely, loving thing, _you and the curls of your hair / me, in distant fears_. 

“My grief lit that darkness,” Aziraphale says again, just because it’s a beautiful line, and sighs. “A saint, sahib? If you drank less wine?”

Ghalib shrugs, self-effacing. “Allahhu akbar,” he says. 

“Yes, She is,” Aziraphale mutters. “More wine, more beautiful nautch-girls, less devotional poetry. Bugger this.”

He’s just called himself a beautiful nautch-girl, but Aziraphale is too irritated to be embarrassed. This is what Hell wants removed from the world. Not this man’s soul, but his art.

“Israfel?” Ghalib says, now looking really worried, and Aziraphale makes a decision. He concentrates, sits up again and returns to himself: still neither man nor woman, but now mild-mannered bookseller. His wings flash for a bright moment against the night sky. 

“Sahib,” he says. “I am not named _for_ Israfel. I am the one to whom Allah gave the name.” 

“Allah ke malak,” Ghalib says, breathless with awe. He would have been disbelieving, but for the wings: but for the light of transformation across his face.

“Allah ke malak,” Aziraphale agrees, and sighs. He hates Mendelssohn, likes ghazals, adores Bach’s cantatas to all angels; he is, in Ghalib’s tradition, the angel of music. He prefers that to being the angel of the Eastern gate. It seems crass, to be reminded unto eternity of one’s failures.

Ghalib is not one of Aziraphale’s failures. For that matter, neither are a man and woman who had a light in the first darkness. “Well,” Ghalib says, his eyes shining. “Sing for me, malak.”

“I can’t,” Aziraphale confesses. “I really can’t. I couldn’t tempt you with licentiousness either.”

He’s had some sharbat and wine, and he is a little starstruck by Ghalib. In poetry, and vino, veritas. 

“An angel attempts to tempt me?” Ghalib looks at him. “Am I Yakub?”

“Oh, no,” Aziraphale says hastily. The angel that wrestled with Jacob was Uriel, and it was very embarrassing for everyone. “No, I’m, ah, I’m covering for a friend.”

Ghalib laughs. “You have other friends, Israfel? Do you do so well in tempting _them_?” 

He reaches in and kisses Aziraphale briefly, then leans back on the cushions. Aziraphale shouldn’t be able to blush, but he does. When Ghalib reaches for him again, he smiles and draws again on the mood of self-indulgence. Because the poet knows what he is, this isn’t temptation: it’s truth. As it is with him and Crowley, Aziraphale thinks, while Ghalib discovers various things about angels. (Their skin is cooler than humans’; their blood burns deep.) Crowley, who knows all of what he is, failures, temptations and all, a truth unburdened by the divine. But Crowley has never asked him for this, and Aziraphale will not ask them. 

Years later, Ghalib will write, with the sparse, ecumenical simplicity that characterisises his poetry: _to those who are wise, the Ka’ bah is a compass, not a destination_. Aziraphale will take another three centuries, but he’ll understand that, too.

*

_Edinburgh, 1902 AD_

It takes until the turn of the nineteenth century, but Aziraphale finally gets the hang of it. The thunder is rumbling (that’s Crowley) and the lights have gone out (that’s Aziraphale) and there is a man in a corner trying, again and again, to light a match with shaking hands. 

It catches.

“Upon my soul,” says Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. “It worked.”

Crowley, draped supine and shadowy, looks up from the centre of the occult circle and says: “Good sir, let me go.”

This, astonishingly, was Aziraphale’s idea. Doyle is fresh off the success of A Study in Scarlet and still a respectable physician, but he does have these… fancies. This little summoning ritual is being held in the cellar of Doyle’s house in Edinburgh’s New Town, with the assistance of a new friend Doyle recently made in London, hunting for rare books. 

“Fell, you’re a genius,” Doyle says, in pure delight, as the gas lights come back on. Aziraphale, leaning against the wall with ankles crossed, the Victorian gentleman down to the leather elbow patches and the signet ring, smiles briefly. 

“I did tell you so,” he says after a moment. He doesn’t sound much like himself, Crowley observes, which is odd given how much he looks like himself. This century suits Aziraphale down to the ground. He discovered the elbow patches around the same time Victoria came to the throne and they haven’t gone out of fashion yet. Doyle glances at him again, then starts forwards. The candles in the circle have blown out or been knocked over. A nice touch, Crowley thinks. The chalk sigils remain undisturbed: for all Crowley willingly materialised into it, this is a real occult circle, with a real time limit. If Aziraphale doesn’t pull this off, Crowley has ten minutes until discorporation.

“Well, Doyle,” Aziraphale says, not breaching the chalk, but leaning over the edge so his body heat is palpable. Crowley shivers. “What have you got?”

They weren’t originally sure themselves what would work. Aziraphale wondered if an angel would be the obvious choice, forgetting that Crowley’s wings can’t be miracled any other colour. They tried dying them with white phosphorous, which nearly burned down the bookshop. Crowley flatly refused to be a fairy and after that Aziraphale was out of ideas. So instead, they’ve gone for ‘indeterminate ethereal being’. Crowley’s eyes and snake-like bonelessness ought to be enough to create the impression, but Aziraphale insisted on an outfit of hellish drapery. The cellar floor is chilly. Crowley hates him. 

Seven minutes.

“Creature,” Doyle says, apparently intending to be commanding, but it comes out small and nervous. “What manner of thing are you?”

Crowley lifts their head and says, “I am a sprite of the Other Realms. Good sir, I will die on this side of the veil! You must let me go.”

It’s sweet, bathetic; they even practised saying ‘veil’ without sniggering. In the wake of this pronouncement, there’s no sound save the batter of rain against the windows and the gutter of the gas lamps.

“The Other Realms,” Doyle gasps. It shouldn’t be possible to gasp three words in a row, but he manages it. “Fell, that book you gave me was just the ticket. Forgive me, my dear fellow, I should never have doubted you.”

“No,” Aziraphale says calmly. “But you will not be alone in that sin, if you do as this creature wishes.”

“What do you mean?” Doyle asks, not looking at Aziraphale. His sharp, observant eyes are on Crowley, taking in the flowing chiffon – that stuff was a whole shilling a foot – torn fingernails, yellow eyes, every artefact of the otherworldly. And the hair. In this twentieth century of our Lord, Crowley’s back on the intricate curls and plaits. Aziraphale did them while Crowley read aloud to him from the _Carmina Gadelica_. Doyle loves a good bit of Celtic witchcraft. There are four-leaved clovers embroidered on the hem of the robe, because the angel of the Eastern gate is a dab hand with a needle and impossible to argue with when he’s already picked out the shade. 

“Consider the proceedings of the Society,” Aziraphale says, while Doyle tries to get Crowley’s attention. Crowley coughs dramatically and turns away from him, wishing they’d been able to wear a watch. If there’s no harm done, then there can be no temptation: that’s why Crowley is lying in this circle that could turn them into atoms and paperwork. So goes the logic. Again, Aziraphale’s idea. 

“Upon my soul,” Doyle says again, “I do believe the poor creature is choking on our air.”

Five minutes. Crowley resists the urge to say anything about a detective who lives at 221B Baker Street.

“Good sir, I have done you no harm!” they squeak, through more coughs. Doyle is already grabbing a broom handle to break the circle with. He’s a good man, a compassionate man.

“How delighted they shall to be know that you have succeeded where so many others have failed,” Aziraphale says. He takes the broom handle from Doyle’s hand, with a glance over his head at Crowley. _Don’t overdo it_. “But what will they ask next? Where, good sir, is this fairy sprite that you have so cunningly captured? And you will only have—“

“My notes!” Doyle says suddenly, grabbing his sheaf of papers. How he intends to write while also polishing his glasses and peering at Crowley’s hemline like all his Christmases have come at once, Crowley isn’t sure. “You! Sprite! Creature! Please describe what manner of land from which you come! Is it the starry firmament only? Or does it have cities, towns? Perhaps oceans?”

“Well,” Crowley says, a little nonplussed, “it’s quite crowded. And worse on Sundays.”

Aziraphale, who knows they’re just describing High Holborn, looks exasperated. “Your notes,” he says, to Doyle. “Of course, and very meticulous they will be too. But mark my words: they will only see the empty circle. Whereas if you had the creature itself—“

Crowley is gasping for breath again, thrashing. They turn their head to look directly at Aziraphale. “You _must_ let me go,” he says.

That’s a word of warning to Aziraphale himself, not Mr Fell, Doyle’s new friend. It means, _just an inch more_. It means: _only enough for him to hang himself_.

“Dead or alive,” Aziraphale says. 

Bingo. Crowley’s amazed at how imaginative this is, how indicative of Aziraphale’s six millennia spent around humans, doing human things. Crowley’s in trouble with Downstairs – too many century-long naps and not enough Sturm und Drang for the human condition – and needed something to reset the balance. A big name, for preference. A trophy for Satan’s wall. Aziraphale was in a snit about the Reichenbach Falls at the time. The rest is chalk circles and history. 

“My _dear_ fellow,” Doyle says, looking at Aziraphale. He reaches out, takes the broom handle from Aziraphale’s outstretched hand, but doesn’t do anything with it. He looks at Aziraphale, and then back at Crowley. “Do you really think it will make a difference, to the Society?”

Aziraphale nods.

“Oh,” Doyle says. Crowley has gone deliberately and ominously quiet, letting breath like a death rattle escape their lips. Two minutes.

Aziraphale reaches over Doyle to pick up his pen, and begins making his own notes. It’s a calculated, casual gesture. It suggests that Doyle, too, should be doing the same, and stop worrying about the poor sprite who isn’t susceptible of salvation and probably doesn’t have a mum to miss them. Crowley is horribly impressed.

Doyle puts the broom handle down on the floor. There’s a long, painful second. 

Then Aziraphale walks across the room, kicks the chalk circle open, knocks Doyle unconscious and teleports him into bed thinking he’s had a horrible dream. Aziraphale drags Crowley out across the chalk, picks them up, drops them in one of Doyle’s armchairs and sits down on the floor.

“What,” Crowley says, flat, looking down at him. “Aziraphale, we had him. We had him. Another minute and I’d have got my quota.”

Aziraphale says nothing.

“You panicked, didn’t you.”

“Yes,” Aziraphale says distantly. “Crowley, you look like a Babylonian tart.”

Crowley reaches up and finds their hair is coming unknotted. Aziraphale moves to sit by their feet, looking utterly worn. Crowley swings snake-like over the edge of the chair so their hair comes all the way down into Aziraphale’s hands. Aziraphale unplaits it, smoothing out the strands. He still doesn’t speak.

“Aziraphale,” Crowley says, after a while, when the hands through their hair have relaxed them to the point that they’re no longer worried about the shamrock embroidery or the weight and moment of this question. “What would you have done, if Doyle had got me discorporated?”

“I would have killed him,” Aziraphale says. He licks his fingertip and uses it to unsnarl the last knot of hair. “A sprite technically _is_ a fairy, you know.”

“Fine, I was technically a fairy,” Crowley says waspishly. “Let’s get dinner. You’re paying.” 

“Of course, my dear,” Aziraphale says. He kisses Crowley’s hand before they go out. Crowley is hopeful, then not.

*

_London, 1987 AD_

Aziraphale doesn’t actually have to do this one. Crowley owes him at least two miracles and a minor enlightenment in exchange for the last temptation, which was a substantial matter involving the establishment of a corporate subsidiary and two rounds of complex embezzlement. Also, at one point, pretending to be a traffic warden. 

But he wants to do it. Crowley doesn’t understand. They don’t understand anything about this. In particular, they don’t understand what’s happened to the rest of Aziraphale’s clothes. 

“Are you joining a cult?” they ask, having closed the bookshop door firmly behind them.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” Aziraphale says, crossly. His shirtsleeves are bunched up around his forearms and the fasteners won’t come out.

“You know,” Crowley says, helping Aziraphale with his cuffs. “Renouncing all material things.”

“It’s your fault,” Aziraphale says, waiting for Crowley to finish and then shedding his socks. “I wouldn’t have – thought of it this way, without your damned Arrangement.” 

“It’s not my damned Arrangement, it’s your blessed Arrangement,” Crowley says, in a huff. A pause. “What wouldn’t you have thought of this way?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“Aziraphale,” Crowley says, genuinely stung. “What’s crawled into your wings and died?”

“Wings,” Aziraphale says, fussily, as though reminded. Crowley blinks and Aziraphale’s wings are out on the floor, folded untidily rather than spread. Aziraphale reaches up and jabs wildly at the feathers, making them straggly and ragged around the edges. They drag along the floor as he moves. Crowley watches in bemusement as Aziraphale dispenses the remainder of his clothes and wanders around the bookshop as the Lord made him. 

(As the Lord made both of them.)

“Here,” Aziraphale says, shaking something off into his hand. “Keep this safe for me.”

It’s Aziraphale’s signet ring, worn on his right hand since Eden. Crowley holds it wonderingly, feeling the heat of it, residue from Aziraphale’s flesh and blood. “Why do you wear this?”

It’s odd, but they never thought to ask this question until they saw it taken off. 

“She gave it to me,” Aziraphale says tersely. “Before I lost the other gift She gave me, and then spent centuries tempting for a _demon_.”

“Aziraphale!” Crowley says, stung twice in two minutes. But Aziraphale shakes his head clear of some internal fog.

“I’m sorry, my dear,” he says. “I’m a little tetchy, that’s all. It’ll be over soon.”

“What will?” Crowley asks, now just worried at whatever trouble Aziraphale is about to get himself into. Knowing this angel, it could be anything. Sex, drugs, rare books, joining a naked circus, the Last Night of the Proms.

“I’d rather not talk about it at the moment,” Aziraphale says. “Watch your television set tonight.”

“Television set” is one of those things Aziraphale now gets right, after Crowley spent an inordinate amount of time leading him away from _set-telly_ and _televisual machine_ and _that dratted square_. They’re so pleased to hear Aziraphale say it correctly that they blink and misses what happens next. Aziraphale is gone, teleported to wherever or whatever.

Crowley watches their television set. They watch Top of the Pops and a repeat of Yes Minister. Nothing explains anything that they need explaining. Coronation Street. Pobol y Cwm. 

Nine o’clock news. Parliamentary scandal. A fire in Birmingham. “Finally, today in London’s Soho,” says the newsreader.

Crowley puts down their glass and watches the grainy footage. _“Starting from Gay’s the Word, the gay and lesbian bookshop in Soho, an army of homosexuals has marched on Downing Street. In echo of a similar march in Washington DC, they staged a die-in: marchers lying down on the cobbles prostrate, to protest deaths from AIDS, the autoimmune disorder. Our photographers caught this striking image.”_

It’s a dead angel. Crowley shouts at the television for its miserable reception, hits it, miracles it into perfect clarity, still takes a minute to work through the panic. Aziraphale can’t be dead, only discorporated. If his body is on earth, he can’t be either. Crowley breathes, even though they don’t have to.

The screen has frozen where they hit it. The voiceover goes on to talk about the publicity stunt, the sop to the front pages, and talking heads opine on the use of theological imagery for what is the plainest sin, while Crowley stares at Aziraphale caught in a moment. Crowley themself can’t be tempted. But the image of an angel, with torn outstretched wings, naked down to the bare hands and feet, sexless and bedraggled, makes them feel… something.

Something. That they can’t have, without Aziraphale asking them first. If Aziraphale doesn’t ask, it’s temptation. 

Aziraphale returns to the bookshop just before midnight, now wearing a sheet and a pair of sandals. Those he lets go the moment he returns to the bookshop, in favour of a very Aziraphale outfit of beige and pink. Crowley makes tea, puts it in his hand and waits for him to speak. It takes almost the full mug before he does.

“It was a blessing,” Aziraphale says, tiredly. “The newspapers are doing front page stories, the Bible-bashers think it’s sacreligious, the ones who think it was a publicity stunt just want to know how it was done. The point is, coverage of the march went up astronomically. There’s going to be a parliamentary debate about the issue.”

“Well,” Crowley says carefully. “Isn’t that good?”

Aziraphale nods. “I just don’t think it’s what Gabriel would have told me to do.”

“Fuck Gabriel,” Crowley says, ignoring Aziraphale’s little gasp at the profanity. “It’s not as if him or any of them are paying attention.”

“Not even your lot?"

“If they were, they’d have turned up by now,” Crowley says. “It was on my list. It was supposed to be a temptation.”

“It was a temptation, too,” Aziraphale says. “Some of the Bible-bashers felt very strange inside. Can I have my ring back, please?”

 _Crowley_ feels strange inside. They take out the ring that was part of Aziraphale’s gift from God and give it back to him. “Well done,” they say, not knowing what value their praise has for anyone.

“Thank you,” Aziraphale says. Wonderingly, he adds, “I’m becoming like you.”

“No,” Crowley says. If they’d done today’s work themself, they would have just put in a roadblock, disrupted the march, made police and marchers alike look incompetent. They would just done an evil thing, and worried all the time about what Aziraphale would think. 

“No,” they say, again. “It’s the other way round.”

*

_London, 2019 AD_

After the Ritz and the end times, Aziraphale finally asks. It’s an end to an innocence. It happens on Aziraphale’s bed but not in it, breathless and un-self-conscious. It may be not even be a sin. There may not be such a thing any more.

After that, there’s an apple.

It sits on a picnic blanket, unremarkably. Aziraphale bought it from Waitrose, alongside the croissants they had for breakfast. Crowley catches him looking at it, then says: “You’re worried.”

“I’m worried,” Aziraphale agrees. Hampstead Heath in the sun isn’t a good backdrop for worry, being so relentlessly pretty and carefree. Kids run down the slope towards the lido. Dog walkers make the trek up to the viewpoint. Aziraphale’s picnic blanket is red tartan. It’s all painfully pastoral. “I think we’ve fallen.”

“It’s not a Fall,” Crowley says. “You’d know, angel. Believe me. Yelling. Sulphur. Lot of sulphur.”

“I don’t mean that sort of falling,” Aziraphale says, struggling to articulate what he does mean. 

“Do you know what eight thousand tonnes of elemental sulphur smells like?” Crowley asks. “Like – well, sulphur. But a lot of it.”

“Not that, Crowley,” Aziraphale says. “Just this.”

He kisses Crowley, because he wants to, and he can. What he’s worried about is Adam and Eve, in the garden, who ate of the apple and knew that they were naked. Figleaves and shame entered their world with the snake. 

Crowley smiles. “It took you long enough” – which makes Aziraphale splutter. 

“You weren’t exactly leaping forwards yourself,” he says. “You could have tried to tempt me, any day of the last six thousand years.”

“Not against your will, angel,” Crowley says, softly. In a moment, Aziraphale is back on Eilean Ì, in a more innocent world. He wore the ring God gave him, and he plaited Crowley’s hair.

“All this time,” he says, “you’ve been waiting for _me_ , to—“

He’s so outraged he has to break off mid-sentence. Then he laughs, because Crowley is looking at him with ludicrous fondness, as they have so often all this time. Nothing has changed between them, save a little thing about bodies.

But Aziraphale is still worried. “They became—something else,” he says. “Before, they were like you, and me. Not… fixed. Not him and her and little pictures on toilet doors.”

From their look, Crowley was worried about it, too. “I’m still me,” they say. “You’re still you. Aren’t you?”

Aziraphale gives it some thought. If he wanted to, he could inhabit a body like Eve’s; like Crowley’s; like the halfway-and-neither nautch girl he was for the poet Ghalib. Right now he’s making no effort. He’s a Soho bookseller, the angel of the Eastern gate, the one whom Allah named Israfel. To be such, and now more, feels… good. It feels right.

“Yes,” Aziraphale says. 

“Good,” Crowley says, hissing a word with no sibilance in it. “Do we have any green olives left? I like those.”

Aziraphale rummages in the picnic basket for them, and looks up when Crowley says, “I have a confession to make.”

“What’s that, my dear?” Aziraphale says, digging out cocktail sticks. “I rather thought we knew everything there was to know about each other by now.” 

“I… ah.” Crowley pauses. “I gave you the ones I didn’t want to do.”

“Temptations?” Aziraphale asks lazily. “Oh, my dear, I know.”

“You do?”

“I met Adomnàn, oh, years later,” Aziraphale says. “Round about the time of the lex innocentum.”

He gives Crowley a knowing look. If Adomnàn had succumbed to lust, left Eilean Ì aged twenty-five and never risen to abbot, chronicler, saint, he wouldn’t have promulgated the _Cáin Adomnáin_ : the law against harming women, children and other non-combatants, in the Dàl Riata, and eventually, the civilised world.

“And Ghalib was the greatest devotional poet of his time,” Aziraphale says. “Not that he wasn’t already, when I, ah--”

“You fucked him.”

“Crowley, don’t be vulgar,” Aziraphale says. “It wasn’t temptation, anyway. Quite… the reverse.”

Crowley looks a lot like they want to go back in time and knock Ghalib around the head in a jealous rage. It’s extremely endearing. 

“I am allowed a holy experience of my own, you know,” Aziraphale says mildly. 

“Like being laid out naked on Downing Street with your wings out?” Crowley asks snidely.

“Yes,” Aziraphale says. “Yes, it was holy. You could have had me afterwards if you’d only asked.”

Crowley looks slightly overcome by that remark. But apparently it’s their time for difficult questions, this liminal state, between the end-times and their new beginning. They ask, “Would you really have killed Doyle?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale says, leaning back on the grass. Tourists and birds are singing. “I loved you. I still do.”

He reaches for the apple with a tentative hand, then loses his nerve. A passing child is heading up the hill and Aziraphale grabs her arm, holding out the apple. “Would you like this, little girl?”

There’s no stranger danger here – humans understand at a subconscious level that they’re in the presence of a being made only for love. They talk back when he talks to them in the supermarket. But the kid shakes her head firmly and scurries away. 

“Oh, she’s terrible,” the child’s mother says, laughing as she comes up the hill. “Bags of summer raspberries in the cooler and all she wants is disgusting spaghetti hoops. I think your boyfriend wants your apple back, to be honest,” she adds, gesturing at Crowley over Aziraphale’s shoulder. Aziraphale smiles back.

“You’re quite right,” he says, looking over at Crowley. “Have a lovely afternoon.”

The woman trundles after her offspring, and when she’s gone, Aziraphale looks over to Crowley, and then up to the sky. “I think She’s not letting us off the hook,” he says, and starts slicing the apple with a penknife from his pocket. “I’ve never had one fresh before. Have you?’

“Never had one before at all,” Crowley says, surprised at this realisation. “They seem quite nice.”

“They are,” Aziraphale says. “They make good tarts.”

“ _You_ make a—“

“Oh, hush, Crowley,” Aziraphale says, remembering Ghalib. He puts the apple pieces out onto a paper plate and stares at them. Again, he’s remembering Adam and Eve, undifferentiated in the garden.

But Crowley bites into a piece and nothing happens, save a bit of juice on their fingers. Aziraphale licks it off; again, just because he can. An old biddy out for her evening constitutional clucks at them and Crowley miracles a hole in her tote bag. Aziraphale fixes it after her reading glasses have fallen out onto the Heath. They go back to their picnic. 

“Aziraphale,” Crowley says. “I love you, too.”

“Do you?’ Aziraphale asks. “Well, then, that’s good.”

“Oh, it’s good, is it,” Crowley huffs. “Very convenient. Fills time.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Crowley,” Aziraphale says, kissing them. “We could try sex again, if you wanted.”

“I’d like to try,” Crowley says, though honestly they wouldn’t mind particularly if the two of them didn’t, or did it for a few hundred years and then didn’t. Aziraphale is what matters. 

So does the second apple out of the basket, because of course Aziraphale got them one each. They both bite it into it, one by one, the intimacy of the shared fruit not lost on them.

“It took so long,” Aziraphale says, contemplative, with his mouth full. “Because we didn’t have us. No snake to bring in the news of the outside.”

“No one to set us on the road with a light,” Crowley says. “Still. I’ve got you, and you’ve got me.”

Aziraphale is thinking of an island at the dawn of the word, of music and poetry and love and sex and revolution, all the fruits of the corruption of innocence. And cheese, which is in the basket somewhere, and some more kettle chips. He sets them aside for a minute and miracles the apple core into the spring turf of the Heath. Years from now, they’ll come back to visit the tree.

**Author's Note:**

> There are a lot of translations of Ghalib, but the one Aziraphale quotes is by Adrienne Rich.


End file.
